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Code to Joy

The Four-Step Solution to Unlocking Your Natural

State of Happiness

George Pratt, Ph.d.

Peter Lambrou, Ph.d.

with John david Mann

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This book contains advice and information relating to health care. It is not intended to replace

medical advice and should be used to supplement rather than replace regular care by your

doctor. It is recommended that you seek your physician’s advice before embarking on any medi-

cal program or treatment. All efforts have been made to assure the accuracy of the information

contained in this book as of the date of publication. The publisher and the authors disclaim

liability for any medical outcomes that may occur as a result of applying the methods suggested

in this book. The individual experiences recounted in this book are true. However, the names

and certain descriptive details have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.

The lines from “What Do You Do With the Mad that You Feel?” are the copyright of Fred M.

Rogers, and are used with permission from the Fred Rogers Company.

code to joy: The Four-Step Solution to Unlocking Your Natural State of Happiness. Copyright ©

2012 by George Pratt, Ph.D. and Peter Lambrou, Ph.D. All rights reserved. Printed in the United

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Design by Level C

Illustrations by Dwight Been

f i r s t e d i t i o n

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pratt, George J.

Code to joy : the four-step solution to unlocking your natural state of happiness / George Pratt,

Peter Lambrou, with John David Mann. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978–0–06–206315–1

1. Happiness. 2. Joy. 3. Positive psychology. 4. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Lambrou, Peter

T. II. Mann, John David. III. Title.

BF575.H27P735 2012

158.1—dc23 2011024396

11 12 13 14 15 ov/rrd 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


Co n t e n ts

Foreword by Larry King v

Introduction:stefanie’sQuestion 1

1 AnInterviewwithYourself 9

2 sevenLimitingBeliefs 33

3 theFleaandtheelephant 77

Step 1: Identify 105

4 ADisturbanceintheForce 107

Step 2: Clear 129

5 YourPersonalCodetoJoy 131

Step 3: Repattern 163

6 Anchoring 165

Step 4: Anchor 179

7 takingIttothenextLevel 181

8 ARichLife 197

Conclusion: A Deeper Joy 215

Appendix A. The Four-Step Process 219

Appendix B. Embracing the Biofield 225

Notes 231

Acknowledgments 243

About the Authors 247


Fo R e wo R D

thetwentIethCentuRYhAD its share of medical miracles.

I should know. When you’ve survived a heart attack, had quintuple

bypass surgery, and you’re still going strong a quarter-century later, it

gives you a pretty healthy appreciation for modern medicine.

Still, there are some aspects of the human condition medicine can’t

touch. Or at least it couldn’t until now. Modern medicine has made us a

lot healthier—but what about happier? That may be where the frontier of

medicine lies in this still young century. And one of the undisputed mas-

ters of that new frontier is a clinical psychologist named George Pratt.

The first time I met Dr. Pratt he was a guest on Larry King Live, talk-

ing about a fascinating approach to healing our emotions and creating

lasting improvements in our productivity and sense of fulfillment.

“Whether it’s an unresolved hurt, persistent low self-esteem, or

vague sense of anxious unease,” said Dr. Pratt, “most of us struggle

with some version of what we call the fog of distress. It clouds our lives,

interfering with our relationships, our careers, even our health. And no

matter how many hours you spend on the couch, talking it through just

doesn’t always do it.”

Why not?

“Because there’s typically a disconnect,” he explained, “between

what we logically know about ourselves and the place in the brain where

our emotions live. Sometimes you just can’t get there from here. You

have to find alternative ways to get that information to click.”

Alternative ways like what? Like energy psychology.


vi Foreword

If you’ve never heard the term before, you’re not alone. Neither had

I, before that show. But in the years to come, you and I will be hearing

about it plenty. It refers to innovative techniques that affect the body’s

energy systems, almost like a 60,000-mile tune-up of the thoughts and

emotions. Using these techniques, as my distinguished guest explained

it, you can clear out the past traumas and events that created those dis-

connects in the first place. The result? It’s something like what happens

when a fresh wind blows away the clouds: the sun comes out.

“Actually,” he added, “it’s a pretty easy thing to do. And it works.”

Dr. Pratt has helped pro golfers and ball players improve their game,

jilted young men and women get over heartbreak, estranged couples

get their groove back. He has helped people get past the trauma of ter-

rible accidents, restart faltering careers, recover lost self-confidence, and

move past irrational fears.

He has even helped one talk show host I know—me.

Even before we had him on the show that first time, I knew a little

bit about the good doctor. He had worked with two people on the Larry

King Live staff, and they had gotten fabulous results from those sessions.

Soon I had him on as a guest again, and this time he talked about “creat-

ing your own joy.”

Now I was really intrigued.

We set up a time when he could give me a private demonstration of

the approach you’re about to explore in this book. So we’d have some-

thing to work with, I described an emotional issue in my own life. What

he did with it in the fifteen minutes we spent together blew my mind. To

say it was impressive would be a crime of understatement. It was remark-

able. When he says it’s a simple and easy process, he’s not kidding. When

he says it works, he’s not kidding there either.

George Pratt is a true modern-day healer, and what he and his col-

league, Dr. Peter Lambrou, have created in the pages you’re about to read

is a brilliant formula for tapping into our highest potential. I predict it

will change many people’s lives for the better.


Foreword vii

Including yours.

Whatever is going on in your life, whatever is keeping you from

being as successful, as productive, as flat-out joyful as you’d like to be,

there’s a path that will take you there. I know, because I’ve experienced

it firsthand.

Larry King


I n t R o D u C t I o n

Stefanie’s Question

somethingisnotright.

—Miss Clavel, in the middle of the night, in Madeline

A Few YeARs Ago a woman named Stefanie came to our office

seeking treatment. In the course of our first visit, she asked us a ques-

tion she had been trying to answer for decades. It’s a question millions of

people have asked throughout history. Maybe you have asked it yourself.

Stefanie’s history, we soon learned, was a rags-to-riches success story.

Growing up in a poor family, she took a job in her teens as an office assis-

tant for an advertising company. Working her way up through the ranks,

she eventually reached the top, so that by her mid-forties she had become

CEO and majority owner of the firm. Stefanie also had a rich personal

life. A kind and generous woman, she was active in the community where

she lived with her husband, proud parents of two healthy, thriving kids.

In fact, Stefanie appeared to have been living a charmed life in every

way—except for one thing: she was deeply unhappy.

Stefanie’s unhappiness was practically tangible. When she entered

the room, it was as if a dark cloud entered with her. As she began de-

scribing her situation, it became clear that this dark cloud followed her

into every corner of her life.


2 CoDetoJoY

By all accounts she was a great mother, but she didn’t feel like a

great mother. She also felt deeply guilty about the collapse of a previous

marriage many years earlier, and that guilt hovered over her like the

gloom of an overcast sky. Her health was affected, too: now in her fif-

ties, Stefanie was having severe stomach and digestive problems and had

recently undergone back surgery for a bad disc. Despite all her successes,

that dark cloud had also cast its shadow over her professional world.

After a series of management mishaps, Stefanie’s advertising company

had recently slipped into bankruptcy.

For no apparent reason, Stefanie’s life was unraveling.

“I’ve seen psychiatrists here in California,” she said, “and in New

York, and in London. I’ve been on every antidepressant. I’ve read all the

books and articles about mood issues. I’ve read everything and tried

everything, but that unhappiness still persists—and I don’t know why.

Everyone tells me I have nothing to complain about and everything to

be grateful for. And I know they’re right. But knowing that doesn’t make

it better.”

And then Stefanie asked The Question:

“Why aren’t I happy?”

Over the course of our sixty years of combined clinical practice, we

have heard thousands of variations of Stefanie’s question, from thou-

sands of people:

Why am I anxious? nervous? insecure? always worried? Why can’t I

seem to find or sustain a fulfilling relationship? find work I enjoy? relax

when I am at home with my family? Why do I have this irrational fear of

crowds . . . of men . . . of women . . . of elevators . . . of food . . . of closed

spaces . . . of open spaces . . . of being alone . . . of being with others? Why

can’t I get over that breakup? my compulsive behavior? my challenges with

money? my feeling that I’m a fraud?

In a million different versions, Stefanie’s question echoes throughout

our society and within virtually everyone we know. You probably have

your own version.


Introduction 3

We are the healthiest, best nourished, and longest-living generation

in history. By all rights, we ought to be the happiest, most purposeful,

productive, and fulfilled generation in history, too. But for some reason,

we’re not.

Why not?

It’s a puzzle we’ve been pursuing for decades—and the answer turns

out to have something to do with how water turns into fog.

ImAgIne You ARe stAnDIng just outside your home, sur-

rounded by a dense fog, so thick you can’t see the other side of the street

in front of you. You look to the right, then to the left, but you cannot see

more than fifty feet in any direction. You are surrounded.

How much water do you suppose it takes to create that blanket of fog

that has completely isolated you from your world?

Before you read on, think about this for a moment. Don’t worry if

you’re not good at math or have no background in physics. Just take a

commonsense guess. How much water do you think it took to create this

fog that surrounds you?

Now, are you ready for the answer? A few ounces. The total volume of

water in a blanket of fog one acre around and one meter deep would not

quite fill an ordinary drinking glass.

How is this possible? First the water evaporates, and the resulting

vapor then condenses into minuscule droplets that permeate the air. In

that one-acre block of fog, one drinking glass’s worth of water disperses

as some 400 billion tiny droplets suspended in the air, creating an impen-

etrable cloak that shuts out light and makes you shiver.

This is exactly what happens with certain painful or difficult experi-

ences.

Human beings are remarkably adaptable. Most of the time, when

negative events occur, we are able to learn from them, shrug them off,

and go on with our lives. The experience simply evaporates, leaving us


4 CoDetoJoY

a bit older and wiser. But not always. Sometimes, especially when we

are very young, we have experiences that we cannot shake. Even if they

seem insignificant, no more substantial than a glass of water, when these

upsetting experiences evaporate, they then condense into billions of

droplets of anger, fear, self-doubt, guilt, and other negative feelings, sur-

rounding us with a suffocating blanket that suffuses every aspect of our

lives for years to come.

We call this the fog of distress.

Typically, this vague sense of unease parks itself in the background,

like the annoying hum of a refrigerator or air conditioner we have

learned to block out from our conscious awareness. But whether we are

aware of it or not, it pervades our existence like an insistent headache,

interfering with our ability to have healthy relationships, to perform to

our potential at work, or to have lives that are anywhere near as fulfilling

as they could be. Over the years, that background hum can sabotage our

careers, friendships, marriages. Sometimes, as with Stefanie, even our

physical health starts to suffer.

What is this fog made of? It is part feelings and part beliefs, partly sub-

conscious and partly bioelectrical. You can think of it as an interference

pattern, like radio static, typically set up in the early years of childhood,

when our defenses were still fairly unformed and we hadn’t yet devel-

oped our adult, logical ways of thinking. In other words, it lies outside

the domain of our conscious, logical, verbal thought process. It is like a

computer program running in the background, shading our thoughts

and feelings, reactions and behaviors, our view of ourselves and of our

world—all largely without our conscious awareness that it is even there.

For some, this fog of distress shows up in very distinct and specific

ways, such as an unshakable fear or irrational anxiety, a problem in one

particular area of life. For others, like Stefanie, it is more vague and gen-

eralized. That is, it’s not that any one specific thing is so terribly wrong.

It’s more that nothing is quite right.

This is why Stefanie’s efforts hadn’t given her any relief. Psychothera-


Introduction 5

peutic drugs, like antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications, cannot

disperse that fog; at best, they can somewhat blunt its impact. Talking

it over, whether with friends, counselors, or therapists, won’t disperse it

either, because it doesn’t yield to reason and logical analysis. Trying to

“talk it through” is like trying to reach an underwater cave by driving

around the city streets. No matter how long you drive or which route

you take, you won’t get there. We have to get out of the car, get off the

streets and into the water, and swim a different route altogether.

Fortunately, such a path exists. That’s what this book is about.

thewoRstthIngABoutthis fog of distress is that it can be so

persistent that we come to think of it as “normal.” Yet it is not normal.

We are designed with extraordinary capacities for growth, self-regula-

tion, and self-healing. Our innate blueprint is beautifully crafted to pro-

duce a life of productivity, creativity, fulfillment, and joy. We are meant

to be happy. Instinctively, we all know this, somewhere deep inside. We

all know what it’s like to feel a burst of delight. Every one of us has at

some point in our lives experienced a sense of ecstatic joy, of euphoria at

the sheer sensation of being alive.

Have you ever wondered why that experience has to be so rare and

fleeting?

The answer is, It doesn’t.

Our clinical experiences over the past few decades have shown us

that it is possible to regain that sense of childlike delight at living and

to live our lives to the fullest. As a result of this work, we have come

to believe that we are all here on this earth to be happy and healthy, to

experience joy, love, connection, and contribution. You can become a

better, smarter, calmer, more focused, more powerful, and more deeply

joyful you.

For that to happen, we need to address this pervasive fog of distress,

understand where it comes from and how to dissipate it.


6 CoDetoJoY

We have spent the past several decades unraveling this puzzle, using

the tools of conventional psychology along with new methods and in-

sights from the latest findings at the cutting edge of a field of research

and therapy called energy psychology. Since we began exploring this

new frontier in the 1980s, in our practices, workshops, and public dem-

onstrations, we have administered more than 45,000 individual treat-

ments, with remarkable and consistently reliable results.

Over the past decade, we have adapted our approach into a simple

protocol that you can administer yourself. It is powerfully simple and ef-

fective. We have seen thousands of people use it to clear away their own

fogs of distress.

This is exactly what happened with Stefanie. In that first visit, we

took her through the four steps of this simple protocol:

Step 1: Identify. First, looking back through her life, we helped

Stefanie identify an early painful event whose impact had cast its

long shadow into her world, along with the self-limiting beliefs her

young mind had formed as a result of that experience.

In chapter 1, we take you through a simple, step-by-step process for

doing the same thing. (We also reveal what the event was that had such

an impact on Stefanie.) In chapter 2, we look at the most common self-

limiting beliefs and how to identify them in yourself. In chapter 3, we

explore where these beliefs reside and why they have such a firm grip on

us and learn a fascinating method for flushing them to the surface where

we can deal with them.

Step 2: Clear. Next, we worked with Stefanie using some breath-

ing exercises and neuromuscular techniques to realign her body’s

natural electrical polarity and help disperse that pervasive fog.

In chapter 4, we explore the body’s biofield and what happens when


Introduction 7

our electrical polarities become reversed or disordered. We also learn

a set of techniques for realigning our electrical polarity, incorporating

cognitive psychology together with elements from age-old disciplines,

including yogic breathing and acupressure.

Step 3: Repattern. Next, we helped Stefanie permanently release the

self-limiting belief we identified in step 1 and then install an op-

posite, empowering belief into her being.

Chapter 5 explores the concept of self-efficacy, that is, the ability to

step into the driver’s seat and direct our own lives, together with fasci-

nating new research findings on the power of mental imagery. In this

chapter we also walk you through the repattern step, showing you how

to create a new story for your life.

Step 4: Anchor. Finally, we showed Stefanie several powerful tech-

niques for anchoring those new beliefs and thought patterns so

they would become a permanent part of her and not simply a form

of temporary relief.

In chapter 6 we show you how to complete this simple anchoring step

and use it in the weeks and months ahead as a quick refresher, to ensure

that the impact of the Four-Step Process stays with you. In chapter 7 we

look at ways to use the Four-Step Process to unwrap further layers and

tap into your full potential, and in chapter 8 we outline some additional

simple, daily practices, drawn from our clinical experiences as well as

the latest research, that will help you create the rich life you deserve.

These four steps—identify, clear, repattern, anchor—form the core

of what you will learn in the pages of Code to Joy. In this book, we show

you what this process is, how and why it works, and how you can make

it work for you.

By the time Stefanie left our office that day, the dark cloud was gone.

That was several years ago. It has not returned.


1C h A P t e R o n e

An Interview with yourself

whatdoyoudowiththemadthatyoufeel

whenyoufeelsomadyoucouldbite?

whenthewholewideworldseemsoh,sowrong. . .

Andnothingyoudoseemsveryright?

—Fred Rogers, on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

You ARe wALkIng thRough a field, munching absentmind-

edly on a snack. The sun is out, the air is balmy. A light breeze at your

back. Life is good.

Suddenly you hear an earthshaking crash.

Startled, you look up at the horizon just in time to see a gigantic

plume of ash and dust volcanoing up into the sky and spreading out to

form a gigantic cloud that will persist for days, weeks, perhaps years. It

will blot out the sun and completely change your world. Chances are,

you will not live to see it dissipate.

Oh, one more detail: you are a dinosaur.

sCIentIststeLLusItwas an asteroid striking Earth millions of

years ago that caused the death of the dinosaurs. The impact threw so


10 CoDetoJoY

much debris into the atmosphere, they say, that it darkened the skies and

transformed the climate into what is sometimes termed nuclear winter,

so named because a similar effect would result from the explosion of a

series of nuclear bombs.

The impact of traumatic personal events can have the same kind of

effect, darkening the skies of our own outlook and causing a chilling

effect that permeates every aspect of our lives.

To see how this happens, let’s return for a moment to our first office

visit with our client Stefanie, whom we met in the introduction.

Stefanie’s First Quarter

One clue to the source of Stefanie’s unhappiness surfaced within our

first few minutes of conversation, when she described the nagging guilt

she felt over the collapse of her first marriage. Though it had been many

years since this happened, her feelings were as strong now as they had

been then. In fact, in many ways they were stronger. The old saying

“Time heals all wounds” could not be further from the truth. Wounds

like Stefanie’s don’t get milder with age. They get worse, often digging

deeper and deeper grooves in the psyche.

To Stefanie, that divorce was an asteroid strike. It may have hap-

pened in the distant past, but the debris it threw into the atmosphere

still darkened her skies several decades later.

This is not purely psychological. Stefanie, remember, was already ex-

periencing very real physiological symptoms, too, along with the gradual

breakdown of her personal and professional lives. The impact of trau-

matic events in our lives records itself onto our being on many levels at

once. We are talking about something that is physiological, emotional,

and energetic, as well as psychological.

Sometimes the traumatic event seems as obvious as an actual as-

teroid hitting the planet. After all, it didn’t take long before we were

hearing about Stefanie’s divorce. She spoke about it within the first few

minutes of our meeting.


AnInterviewwithYourself 11

Other times, it is not so obvious. Often significant events occur in

our lives, especially when we are very young and impressionable, that

nobody around us notices at the time they occur. In fact, these early

events can be so subtle that we ourselves don’t notice them or realize the

impact they have had.

This was the case with Stefanie. As we said, that nagging sense of

guilt she described was one clue—but only one. Stefanie’s unhappiness

did not start there; the divorce itself only added to a cloud of debris that

already existed within her and had existed for many years before that.

In the course of our conversation, Stefanie mentioned a number of

events throughout her life that had had an impact on her. As we asked

about her childhood, she had a sudden thought.

“I don’t know if this is significant,” she began. “Probably not . . .”

This is worth noting, by the way: when people preface a recalled

event by saying, “I don’t know if this really means anything,” it almost

always does.

We encouraged her to go on.

“Well, this one time, when I was seven, I helped my aunt move

some furniture around one afternoon. When we were finished, she

thanked me and paid me a quarter. I hadn’t expected to be paid, and

I was thrilled. It was the first money I’d ever earned.” She shook her

head slowly. “You know, I haven’t thought about this for, oh, probably

decades.” She paused, letting the distant memory replay itself. “I was so

proud. I couldn’t wait to tell my family. I bolted home, ran inside, told

my folks about it and held up the quarter for them to see.

“They were shocked. ‘What did you think you were doing?!’ they

hissed at me. ‘You never take money from family!’

“I was crushed.” She paused again, as if lost in the memory, then

added, “I felt so humiliated.”

Her parents no doubt meant well; they were only trying to pass on

what they considered their good family values. But the message Stefanie

took from the experience was fused into her being:


12 CoDetoJoY

It’s wrong and shameful to make money.

And now, a half a century later, Stefanie had lost a successful com-

pany and was rapidly on her way to losing her health—out of lingering

shame over a quarter.

How could such a seemingly minor event have such a deeply felt and

long-lasting impact? To answer this, we need to look at the nature of

trauma.

tiny event, Big Impact

Our modern word trauma is identical to the ancient Greek term for

wound. When we speak of a trauma, we generally mean an event, either

physical or psychological, that has wounded us severely, causing lasting

harm or injury to our body and/or mind. Examples of trauma include

such events as a car accident, serious injury, the death of someone close,

a threat to our own life, an experience in a war zone, a major house fire.

A traumatic event is one that wounds and leaves deep scars.

When a frightening or threatening event occurs, input from our sen-

sory organs—the sights, sounds, and smells of danger—are transmitted

directly to a pair of tiny, almond-shaped nerve clusters called amygdalae.

The amygdalae immediately send alert messages to other parts of the

brain that trigger the release of glucocorticoids, the fight-or-flight stress

hormones such as cortisol and norepinephrine. (Bessel van der Kolk,

M.D., perhaps the world’s leading authority on trauma, describes the

amygdalae as “the smoke detector of the brain.”) Flooding the system,

these hormones provide the muscles with an immediate burst of energy

and at the same time shut down all nonessential processes, such as di-

gestion and immune response. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex—the

front part of the brain, where logic and rationality are based—goes dark,

that is, it essentially shuts down.

Severe trauma can have profound and lasting damage, crippling

one’s ability to trust others and creating a deeply embedded array of



symptoms known as post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. These

symptoms can include persistent and intrusive memories; nightmares or

disturbed sleep; sudden and seemingly unprovoked outbursts of anger

or other emotions; hypervigilance; and a degree of emotional numb-

ness.

“But wait,” you might be thinking. “Post-traumatic stress—from a

scolding over a quarter? That seems a little extreme!”

Fair enough. From outward appearances, Stefanie’s encounter with

her parents’ disapproval hardly seems to qualify as a bona fide trauma

on a par with life-threatening violence or serious bodily injury. It’s not

as if she were beaten and thrown out of the house, or even punished. She

suffered no physical harm. Even all these years later, sitting in our office

and talking about it, Stefanie herself had a hard time crediting it as a

very significant thing.

But it was. Whether or not anyone saw it happen, whether she herself

was even consciously aware of it, an asteroid had slammed into young

Stefanie’s world, and the debris it threw into her atmosphere had never

gone away. Even now, at the distance of a half-century, it still blocked the

sun from shining in her sky.

We’ve used the Four-Step Process thousands of times with people

who have experienced full-blown, major traumas, not just from child-

hood but also in their adult lives, and we share some of these remark-

able stories of crisis and recovery in this book. But a precipitating event

doesn’t have to be dramatic or obviously traumatic to have a deep and

lasting impact.

Remember, under the right circumstances, all it takes to create a

blanket of impenetrable fog is a glassful of water. Stefanie’s event does

not qualify as what we would think of as a clinical trauma. Instead, it

was something more insidious: a microtrauma.

A microtrauma is an event or experience that would seem from all

outward appearances to be not a very big deal, and certainly not devas-

tating. In fact, it may be so mild that you think you’ve completely put it


14 CoDetoJoY

behind you. But you haven’t. It stays with you, just as Stefanie’s memory

had stayed with her so vividly that she was able to pull it up within min-

utes of our first meeting her, even though, by her own admission, she

had not thought about it for decades.

This is why we say these microtraumatic events can be even more

insidious than full-blown traumas: precisely because they hide behind

the veneer of innocent insignificance. These are often the kinds of expe-

riences that seem so trite, so harmless, that, looking back, we have a hard

time seeing them as being significant turning points in our lives.

What’s more, other people in our lives, especially those we look to as

authorities, often dismiss such “insignificant” events as well, reinforcing

our own sense that they should not have any real impact on us.

“Get over it,” they say. “Don’t be a baby. It’s no big deal.” And we

believe them. “They’re right,” we tell ourselves. “It was nothing. Sure it

happened, and so what? I got over that ages ago.”

But it was not nothing. To us, it was an asteroid strike. And for most

of us, it’s not something you “get over.” It’s something that casts a suf-

focating blanket over the climate of your life—until you learn the simple

tools it takes to identify it and clear it.

There is a reason we often don’t realize the full impact of our own

microtrauma. There is a natural tendency to dismiss it, to do our best

to put it behind us and just get on with living. To an extent, this is a

healthy, protective mechanism. We minimize the impact of what has

happened in order to cope and go on. But sometimes, especially when

we are young, we cannot simply “put it behind us.” Instead, we can only

drive it deeper inside, and the short-term gain in composure comes at

the expense of long-term suffering.

“What do you do with the mad that you feel?” asked Fred Rogers in

his popular children’s television program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

It’s a great question. What do we do with the mad that we feel—the

shame, the embarrassment, the fear, the panic, or the sadness?

The answer, typically, is that we don’t do anything with it. It just stays



there, like that choking dust cloud of debris that blocked out the sun and

killed off the dinosaurs.

A Single Wave

As part of our annual seminar, we take the entire group into the ocean

to swim with dolphins. One day, we were preparing to go into the water

when one of the participants, a young woman named Alex, approached

us and said, “I have a little problem. I can’t go in with you—I’m afraid.”

We assured her that the water would be calm, shallow, and not at all

dangerous. There were no sharks anywhere in this vicinity.

“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “I’m not afraid of sharks, I’m

afraid of the water. I mean, severely afraid.”

All her life, she explained, she had been afraid of water—so afraid

that she was unable to drink straight from a glass. If she wanted a drink

of water, she would have to use a straw. She could take brief showers with

some difficulty. But the only baths she could take were sponge baths,

because she was unable to sit down in a tub of water.

Alex was there at the seminar with her dad, and as we briefly ex-

plained how early events can trigger deeply held limiting beliefs, he

spoke up.

“If you’re talking early events, I think I know exactly what it was for

Alex.”

They had been at the beach once when Alex was three years old.

As they stepped carefully out into the surf, a small wave came up and

surged over little Alex’s head.

“I grabbed her and picked her up,” he explained. “It was over in

moments, and she was never in any danger. But she never wanted to go

swimming after that.”

The original event that generated Alex’s sense of trauma had lasted

all of ten seconds. Its impact had lasted two decades.

We took her through the Four-Step Process, right then and there.

Once we’d finished she said, “Huh. That’s weird.”


16 CoDetoJoY

What was weird? we asked.

“I feel different.”

She asked her dad to get her a glass of water—and right in front of

the entire group, she did something she had not done once in twenty

years: she drank water from a glass. Later that day, she walked out into

the surf and waded in up to her waist. It was an amazing thing to watch.

The next day, as we went out onto the open ocean, Alex followed

along in a boat, nervous but excited. As the dolphins came close, we all

began swimming alongside them. Suddenly there was a small splash:

Alex, wearing a flotation device, had dived off the back of the boat.

She took to the water as if she had been a swimmer all her life. Re-

moving the flotation device and tossing it back into the boat, she swam

over and joined us with the dolphins. A little later, swimming with an

assistant, she went snorkeling for twenty minutes. She was a natural.

What happened? Once we were able to clear the impact of that initial

asteroid strike, the entire cloud of dust and debris associated with it dis-

sipated and disappeared.

A death by a thousand Cuts

Sometimes the “event” is not a single occurrence on a given hour and

day, but a series of experiences spread out over time.

Caitlyn was twenty-six years old when her car broke down one day

on the freeway. After nearly an hour of waiting, the tow truck arrived. In

a space of twenty minutes, the driver fixed her car and had it back on the

road. Caitlyn paid the man and was safely on her way.

But while her car was fine, Caitlyn was not.

Within a few days, Caitlyn realized that the event had triggered a

genuine phobia of being on that freeway. Soon she was afraid to drive

on any freeways, then on city streets. Before long, she could barely make

herself get in the car to drive anywhere at all, other than the very short

distance to her neighborhood store.

Getting rides from friends helped, but not enough. One day, while a



friend was driving her to work, she became nearly paralyzed with fear as

they drove over a bridge—the same bridge she had gone over hundreds

of times before without giving it a second thought.

By the time Caitlyn came to see us, she had become severely handi-

capped. Not being able to drive is tough anywhere; in southern Cali-

fornia, the freeway capital of the world, it was positively crippling. She

could barely get to work and back, and her social life had slowed to a

rush-hour crawl.

After Caitlyn told us what was going on, we began looking into what

precipitating events might have happened in her childhood.

We soon learned that Caitlyn grew up in a family of perfectionists.

In her childhood home, a premium was placed on being orderly and

spotless. Her parents were very exacting, and she received a lot of criti-

cism. “You didn’t make your bed properly! You left a mess behind! Look,

you spilled some food!” Each one, taken by itself, was a minor thing and

hardly traumatic. But piled up one on top of the other, day after day,

year after year, they had the cumulative impact of an asteroid strike.

Like the death by a thousand cuts, Caitlyn’s sense of self gradually bled

out until she became thoroughly imprinted with the message, Can’t you

do anything right?

Of course, she had long since managed to put these constant criti-

cisms “behind her” and had grown up to become a healthy, fully capable

adult. But then something happened. The day her car broke down on

that freeway, her familiar, helpless feeling of having messed up once again

triggered an entire backlog of childhood emotions, and that old message

rose up within her like a dragon awakened from slumber.

It’s important to realize that at no point did Caitlyn have the con-

scious thought, “Oh, look at this, I got myself stranded on the freeway—

I guess my parents were right all along. I can’t do anything right.” That

was the message, but it was so well established and deeply entrenched

that, like the annoying refrigerator hum we learn to ignore, she was not

even aware of it.


18 CoDetoJoY

And even if she had been aware of it, she likely would have dismissed

the thought as silly. That message would scarcely have seemed justi-

fied by the circumstances. Hey, her car broke down: it could happen to

anyone, right?

But the fog of distress acts beyond the province of logical, conscious

thought. Caitlyn knew she was a bright, resourceful, capable, grown

woman. Alex knew that neither a glass of water nor a stroll in the surf

would hurt her. Stefanie knew she was not a bad, selfish person.

But knowing these things was not enough to make the critical dif-

ference. Conscious, logical thought cannot disperse that cloud of debris.

traumatic Resonance

Why, if Caitlyn had been able to function normally for all these years,

did a chance freeway breakdown affect her so strongly? Most of us have

had to change a flat tire or call a tow truck at least once in our lives, and

we have done so without falling apart. So why was this event different

for her?

Because of a phenomenon called traumatic resonance.

If you pluck the low E-string on a guitar, you’ll see the high E-string

vibrate along with it, thrumming as if it had been plucked by a phan-

tom finger. This happens because the specific vibration rate of the high

E (660 Hz) is an even multiple of the E two octaves lower (165 Hz). In

other words, they are not identical, but they sound closely similar. The

same thing happens if you hold a tuning fork next to a piano and strike

the key for A above middle C: the tuning fork will vibrate, too.

This is called resonance, a word that literally means “sounds again.”

When the vibrations of two different phenomena have a similar shape or

frequency, we say they “resonate with each other.” Another term for this

phenomenon is sympathetic vibration.

Musical notes are not the only things composed of vibrations: so are

thoughts and feelings, events and circumstances—and the same princi-

ple applies. If you hear an idea or opinion that you are in sympathy with,

you might say it resonates with you.



We often find that an early childhood experience will leave its mark

and then be reinforced or reactivated by events later in life that resonate

with the early event, much as the sound of a car backfiring can trigger

the traumatic memories of combat.

This is what happened with Caitlyn. Because it resonated strongly

with a deeply held belief that she had formed very early in life, her

freeway breakdown plucked the strings of her early childhood experi-

ences, setting them into sympathetic vibration—and like a sudden cold

triggering a dormant infection, or a strong wind stoking a pile of long-

standing embers into a fresh blaze, that negative belief reared its ugly

head.

The same thing was true for Stefanie. That original event at the age

of seven left her with a deep, inarticulate sense that she was bad and self-

ish. As a grown woman, the impact of her painful divorce resonated with

that same message. The I am bad and selfish of her divorce was such a

clear echo of the I am bad and selfish of her childhood event that Stefanie

experienced it as an asteroid strike all over again.

The two sets of events may have had no rational connection. But that

didn’t matter: they had resonance.

your Story

The first step in the Four-Step Process is to identify the nature of your

personal fog of distress, and that starts with finding the asteroid strikes

in your own past.

Let’s start by just relaxing for a moment, and letting your mind

amble back through your earliest memories.

When we see a client for the first time, one of the first things we typi-

cally do is take his or her history. People often feel an urge to talk things

out, and sometimes this can take up the entire first session. Early in our

practice, we noticed that we could go through an entire appointment,

hearing a good deal of personal history, without having gotten to any-

thing critical that we could really put our finger on. Often we would find

ourselves at the end of a session saying something like this:


20 CoDetoJoY

“In the next few days, before our next visit, we’d like you to write

down the three or four most significant events in your life that you can

remember, from as early as you can recall.”

We soon found that we could help new clients more effectively by

cutting right to the chase and giving them that homework right at the

outset.

So let’s have you do that now.

Take a moment to think back and reflect on the earliest events you

can remember. Big or small, major or trivial, it doesn’t matter. What is

the earliest experience you can recall?

You don’t need to think too hard about this. Just fish for a moment

in your pool of early memories, and pull up the first event that nibbles

on the line.

Go ahead: put the book down for a moment, and see what memory

comes to mind.

hAveYouDonethAt?Good; now take another moment to do

the same thing a second time, and recall another early memory from

your childhood.

now, one LAst tIme, throw the line out and fish for a third

childhood memory you can bring to mind.

As You ConsIDeR eACh of these three memories in turn,

ask yourself, Is this overall a more positive memory or a more negative

memory?

You might have brought up images of happy times, thawing by the

fire after an afternoon of sledding, the smell of Grandma’s cookies

baking . . . but the chances are better than even that the first events you

thought of were not so happy.



Why? Because there is a natural tendency to remember the more

painful events of our lives. Our minds are wired to imprint in our

memory stronger emotional experiences over milder ones, and negative

or painful emotional events tend to imprint longer than positive ones.

Because of this, it is likely that at least two of your three memories were

of more unpleasant experiences.

To a degree, this tendency is healthy: it aims to provide for our sur-

vival. It’s good to remember exactly where in the forest you found those

nice berries and that delicious honey—but it’s more important to re-

member where you narrowly escaped being eaten by that hungry tiger. It

is often through a bad scare or painful encounter that we learn some of

our earliest and most valuable lessons. Once you’ve touched a hot stove,

“Don’t touch that!” becomes more than mere words.

The fact that an event has stuck in your mind as a clear memory

does not necessarily mean it has had a lasting impact. Often childhood

experiences with difficult or uncomfortable aspects to them truly are

innocent events that cause no long-term damage. Negative experiences

are, to a considerable extent, how we learn. Sometimes a glass of water is

just a glass of water.

However, as we’ve seen, sometimes certain negative events can con-

tinue to exert their grip on us long after it serves any useful purpose for

them to do so. Those are the memories we’re looking for here.

the Investigation

The three memories you pulled up in the previous exercise may include

one or more of these key events we’re looking for, but then again, they

may not. Let’s take a few moments now to investigate the situation more

systematically.

Ask yourself:

What painful or unpleasant events or experiences do I remember

from my childhood that had a strong or deep impact on me?


22 CoDetoJoY

Quite often people will key in on these significant experiences right

away. Often they will be events that they haven’t given much thought to

for years, as happened with Stefanie.

“Now that you mention it,” we’ll hear clients say, “yes, something

peculiar did happen when I was little. I haven’t thought about this for

ages. . . .”

We often hear, “It’s probably nothing, but . . .”—and typically the

event that follows that but turns out to be quite significant indeed.

Another comment people frequently make is, “Well, I don’t remem-

ber very much . . .”—and then, once they start exploring one memory, it

leads to another, and then another, and they soon find that they actually

remember a lot. It can be like finding a half-inch bit of thread sticking

out at the end of your sweater sleeve. You give it an innocent little tug—

and before you know it, the whole sleeve has come unraveled.

Here are some examples of common traumas and microtraumas that

may help jog your memories or help you identify early events that have

left their mark. As you read through this list, check off those that apply

to you:

❏❏ Iwasverysick.

❏❏ Afamilymemberwassick.

❏❏ Iwashospitalized.

❏❏ myparentsdivorcedorseparated.

❏❏ Ilostaparent,grandparent,otherfamilymember,or

someoneelseIwascloseto.

❏❏ mypetdied.

❏❏ myparentsleftmewithsomeoneelse(evenifthiswasfora

shorttime).

❏❏ Iwasleftalone(inasupermarket,atmygrandparents’

house,andsoon).

❏❏ Ilostafriend(theymovedaway,wenttoanotherschool,and

soon).

❏❏ wemoved.



❏❏ Iwasinacaraccident.

❏❏ Iwasnotchosenforateam.

❏❏ Iwasteased.

❏❏ IwascriticizedorscoldedbysomeoneIrespected.

❏❏ therewasalackofcontactoraffectioninmyhome.

❏❏ Isufferedamajordisappointmentorletdown(experienced

asbetrayal,evenifitwasinnocuousorwithgoodreason).

❏❏ Iwashitorpunished.

❏❏ Iremembermyparentsyellingorarguing.

❏❏ Ihadafrighteningexperiencewithadog(orotheranimal).

❏❏ someoneItrustedorlookeduptobetrayedmytrust.

❏❏ mydadormomremarriedandsuddenlytherewassomeone

else(stepparent,stepsiblings)inmyfamily.

❏❏ Iwasbullied.

❏❏ Ifeltdifferentfrommypeers(inphysicaldevelopment,

abilities,ethnicity,andthelike).

❏❏ Iwentthroughphysicalchanges(agrowthspurt,puberty,

developedaphysicalhandicap,orotherchange).

❏❏ Iwashumiliatedorashamed.

As you scan through this list, there are probably at least two or three

statements that jump out at you and may trigger memories of your own.

If any additional memories occur to you, in just a moment we’re

going to ask you to jot them down. You don’t need to write a detailed

description, just a phrase or even one or two words to identify each one.

And by the way, once you’ve identified a few events in your past,

we’re not going to ask you to get down on your knees and muck around

in them. The point is not to re-experience the feelings or emotions of the

past event, but simply to identify the event so you know clearly what it is

and can refer back to it quickly and easily.

Often the best way to do this is to come up with a short phrase, even

a single word or two, that will serve as a reference to the event.

“Seventh birthday”


24 CoDetoJoY

“Hurt in the playground”

“Grandma died”

“Moved away”

“Car accident”

“Fell out of the tree out back”

“Hospital in second grade”

For Stefanie, it was, “My first quarter.” For Caitlyn, it was, “Being

criticized.” For Alex, it was, “That wave.”

As you identify these early memories, you’ll want to write them

down because you’ll refer back to them later as you go through the steps

of the Four-Step Process.

If you aren’t sure yet whether a particular memory is really sig-

nificant or not, don’t worry: we’ll explore that question further in a

moment. For now, let’s just go with whatever experiences you’ve come

up with so far.

Go ahead, take a moment now to identify these early memories and

write them down.

Adult Experiences Count, TooNot all asteroid strikes take place when we are children. Sometimes

painful events happen in our teenage or adult years that continue to

exert a powerful impact on us long after we think we have gotten over

them.

Identifying these more recent events is helpful for two reasons. First,

traumatic events from your adult past may be significant sources of cur-

rent issues in and of themselves. And second, they may serve as clues or

pointers to much earlier events, like Stefanie’s divorce.

As you scan through the following list, think about any painful ex-

periences that may have occurred in your teenage or adult years, and jot

those down briefly as well. Again, check off those that apply to you.



❏❏ Ihadanaccidentorbodilyinjury.

❏❏ Iexperiencedahealthcrisis.

❏❏ Idevelopedachronichealthproblem.

❏❏ Iwentthroughadivorce.

❏❏ Iwentthroughapainfulbreakupordysfunctional

relationship.

❏❏ Iexperiencedabankruptcy,businessfailure,lossof

investment,orotherfinancialreversal.

❏❏ Iexperiencedatheftorbreak-in.

❏❏ Ilostmyjob.

❏❏ Ilostmyhome.

❏❏ Afamilymemberdied.

❏❏ Iexperiencedthelossofeyesight,hearing,orothermental

orphysicalfunction.

❏❏ Ilostsomeoneclosetome(throughdeath,miscarriage,

abortion,estrangement,orotherexperience).

More Clues to the Past

If nothing has come to mind, or you feel you haven’t yet hit on anything

that is very significant, that’s okay. Give this time. Often these memories

take a little time and patience to bring up from the pool of the past—es-

pecially from the earliest years of our lives.

We have very little capacity to remember consciously our experiences

before the age of three or four (for reasons we explore in chapter 5). And

even later, throughout childhood, the character of our memories can be

quite different from our adult memories.

Here are some pointers that can help the process along.

AskothersAsk a relative or family member, someone who knew you from early

childhood, if anything significant happened to you that you might not

remember.


26 CoDetoJoY

We had a client who had a terror of hospitals. It turned out, when

he was three years old he was whisked to a hospital in an ambulance

by himself, with no parent or other family member present. He did not

come up with that bit of his own biography; he himself had absolutely

no recollection of it. In fact, he had no idea it had happened. It was not

until he was in conversation with his mother one day that she said, “Hey,

do you remember when you were three . . . ?” and she told him what had

occurred.

Remember the event that gave Alex her deathly fear of water? It was

her father who told us about this event, not Alex herself. In fact, she did

not even have a clear memory of that day or of what had happened as she

and her dad walked out into the surf.

Just because you don’t consciously remember an event doesn’t mean

it hasn’t had—and doesn’t still have—a powerful impact on you. If it’s

something that you don’t remember yourself, but it’s a story you’ve heard

from someone who knew you when you were young, put that down, too.

CumulativetraumaAgain, as with Caitlyn’s childhood, sometimes it is not the impact of a

single event but the cumulative effect of many events. Not an asteroid

strike causing nuclear winter, but the gradual effects of an overall cli-

mate shift. The slights at school day after day, the repeated taunts, being

embarrassed by a parent over and over for making simple mistakes—

spilling the milk one day, buttoning your shirt wrong another day, and

so forth.

We’ll see more examples of this kind of cumulative traumatization

in the stories in these pages. It’s a very common scenario.

vicarioustraumaSometimes we are deeply affected by events that we do not go through

ourselves but that happen to people we are close to, or even people we

hardly know. For example:



• Mybrotherorsisterwashurt.

• Mydadlosthisjob.

• Myfriend’sparentsdivorced.

• Aneighbor’shousewasvandalized.

• Astudentinmyschoolfellillanddied.

Events we experience vicariously can have a far more profound

impact on us than we realize.

Weighing the Impact

Sometimes, at this point in the process, people say, “I’ve got at least a

half-dozen events on my list. How do I know which events really count?

How do I know which one has had the most impact?”

In chapter 3, we’ll explore a fascinating method for confirming

which events have had the most impact on us and, more important,

which ones are still having the most impact today. But making this dis-

tinction is mostly a matter of gut sense, and it is surprisingly easy once

you get into it. After all, nobody knows you better than you.

For starters, look at the first memory on your list.

Take a few deep breaths and reflect back on that event or experience

for a moment. As you do, notice whether or not you feel any emotional

charge, any twinge of feelings about the event. Don’t try to analyze it or

figure out what it means. For now, we’re just trying to determine if the

experience has had a lasting impact that still exerts a force in your life.

Again, just because you remember a painful event does not neces-

sarily mean it has had a lasting negative impact. Many people have

been teased (who hasn’t?), have moved, have lost a friendship, or have

been harshly criticized without it having had any long-term effect. If

a memory is simply a piece of your biographical information, an event

from the past that you recall without any strong feelings attached to it, it

probably does not play a significant role in your life today.

But if you have a memory that is uncomfortable to think about even


28 CoDetoJoY

now, this could be a source of negative belief. And if you feel resistant to

exploring it, that too could be a sign that there is something meaningful

about the experience.

By the way, this is not a question of whether you consider yourself

as having had an overall happy childhood, or an overall unhappy child-

hood. We’ve seen thousands of people who describe their childhoods in

generally positive terms, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t still indi-

vidual events and experiences that caused them lasting pain.

By the same token, we’ve seen thousands of people whose early his-

tories seem like Dickensian novels, full of incredible difficulties and

harsh circumstances, yet who emerged from these tough beginnings as

relatively healthy, whole, and happy people.

writeItDownYou may wish to write out a description of the remembered experience

in some detail to bring it more clearly to mind. Close your eyes and

recall, as best you can, exactly what happened, and then open your eyes

and write.

Or, you may prefer just to recall the general feeling of it, without

getting into it in detail. That’s fine, too. There is no wrong way to do

this. Connect with that past event in whatever way feels easiest or most

natural.

speakItoutLoudSaying it out loud can be helpful. When clients tell us their discover-

ies, it’s often the fact that they’re speaking them out loud, and not that

it happens to be us they’re telling, that lets them feel the impact those

memories have.

You can do the same thing, even on your own. As you identify an

event from your past that has had an impact, simply describe it out loud

as if you were telling someone. Speaking this into a recorder can be help-

ful, too.



LookforResonanceSometimes you’ll notice right away that an event from the past has clear

echoes in the issues you are dealing with today.

A friend of ours broke his arm falling out of a tree when he was

young. As an adult, he was extremely uncomfortable going to doctors’

offices; in fact, the mere smell of antiseptic was enough to make his

palms sweaty. He never knew why—until we had a conversation about

it and he matter-of-factly pointed out that the first time he remembered

setting foot in a doctor’s office was when he had his broken arm set.

A client was terrified of a big dog in her neighbor’s yard when she was

six. She was never bitten, but the dog would bark like crazy whenever

she went by. As an adult, she had a strong apprehension about going into

unfamiliar places or situations.

You see the connection? That’s traumatic resonance.

As you consider each memory on your list, ask yourself, Is there a

connection between the substance of that experience and whatever issues

are going on in my life today?

wheninDoubt,writeItDownDo your best to identify events that have had a strong negative impact on

your life. You might not remember all the specifics, but if you experience

discomfort merely when reading any of the statements on the preceding

lists, you most likely have either forgotten the situation or have shut it

out from your conscious awareness years ago. Consider that statement as

if it applies to you.

If you don’t see any obvious resonance, don’t worry. Even if you don’t

find any correlation between an early memory and whatever issues are

going on for you now, the sheer fact that you remember this experience,

the fact that it came up for you in the course of your interview with

yourself, suggests that it may be significant.

Write it down.

If you’re curious about it, if it doesn’t feel entirely resolved, or even if

it simply sticks out in your mind for no apparent reason—write it down.


30 CoDetoJoY

your Inherent Code to Joy

If you now have a list of several early events but are not 100 percent sure

which is the most significant one, don’t worry: you’ve got plenty enough

to work with.

This is the beauty of the Four-Step Process: it’s extremely forgiving.

In other words, you don’t have to worry about whether you are “getting

this right.” Even if you have no more than just a little information to

go on, the process will still go to work and start dissipating that fog of

distress.

Why? Because human beings are designed to self-correct.

The human organism is built to self-calibrate through what science

calls homeostasis, which simply means we have a strong tendency to

return to equilibrium, no matter how out of balance we become. This

is why our body temperature so consistently gravitates to 98.6˚ and the

pH level of our blood normally stays very close to 7.35. The same thing

is true of our emotional state. There is an emotional balance built into

us that our organism strongly wants to maintain and to which it will

return if given half a chance. Remove the blockages that life’s more pain-

ful circumstances have put in its way, and it will. It is like a gravitational

pull—an inherent code to joy.

To illustrate just how strongly this innate tendency wants to bring

us back into emotional balance, and how readily the Four-Step Process

facilitates this happening, here is one more story before going on to the

next chapter.

david’s Breakthrough

A few years ago a journalist named David came to interview us for a

story. As we described our work, we asked him to think of something

that was nagging at him, something we could perhaps help him clear up,

by way of demonstration. He thought for a moment, then said, “Well,

okay, I guess I’ve got something.” And he told us about a lingering re-

sentment he had concerning a previous marriage.



We took him through the steps of the Four-Step Process and then

asked him how he felt. He shrugged. “Not much different, really. A little

lighter, I guess, but nothing dramatic. But then, this thing wasn’t nag-

ging at me that badly before, anyway.”

We continued with the interview and then parted ways.

Late the next day we got a call from David. His voice practically burst

through the telephone with excitement. “You will not believe what hap-

pened!” he said, and he told us what had occurred earlier that day.

That morning (the morning after we had met), David was scheduled

to drive to a nearby hotel for an interview with a local author. At the

last minute, something had come up requiring his interview subject to

return home, and the man had left a message at the hotel asking David

if he would mind driving out to his home to conduct the interview there

instead.

David’s heart had leapt into his throat. He was not from this area,

he was driving a rental car that had no GPS, and he didn’t know his way

around. His subject lived out in Rancho Santa Fe, a half-hour away and

at the end of a long route of twists and turns out in the country.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. As it turned out, unknown or unfa-

miliar road directions happened to be David’s psychological Achilles’

heel.

“All my life,” David explained to us, “I have had an absolute panic

about road directions. If I have to drive somewhere I’ve never been

before, alone, with no one to be my navigator, I get paralyzed with

anxiety. It doesn’t matter if I have a good map and great directions. The

moment someone starts to explain how to get there, my mind shuts

down. I don’t hear it, can’t retain it.”

Worse yet, the person at the hotel had been able to give him only

vague directions. David had set out for his interview with no clear map

or directions, quite sure that he would be hopelessly lost within minutes.

“And get this,” he said. “Not only did I not get lost, I never had a

single moment of anxiety. I rolled down the window, enjoyed the scen-


32 CoDetoJoY

ery, and casually just drove, way out in the middle of nowhere. I never

panicked, not even for a moment—and I found my way there with no

problem whatsoever. I know this sounds nuts, but this has never hap-

pened to me before!”

Remember, we had not intended to treat David for this issue. In fact,

we were not aware that he had this issue. He had not said a word to us

about it. We thought we were treating him for one thing, and given that

slight opening, David’s innate sense of emotional homeostasis leapt at

the opportunity to heal an entirely different problem—one we didn’t

even know existed.

That’s how versatile the Four-Step Process is—and how powerful.

Where to Go from Here

At this point, you should have one or more memories singled out to

focus on. In chapter 3, we’ll return to this self-investigation and learn a

fascinating technique for evaluating the impact these past events have

had in your life. But first we need to look at the second piece of this pic-

ture.

Up until now, we’ve been focusing on the asteroid strike itself. Now

it’s time to turn our attention to that dust cloud of negative beliefs and

see exactly what it looks like.


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